Clearly you have a personal leaning towards single-character action/RPGs (based on your "great RPGs" examples), which is obviously a perfectly reasonable preference. Gothic is one of my favourite all time games but while it is very good at doing certain things (and you mention non sign-post NPCs in your previous post) it really doesn't do a good job at other things, such as deeper dialogue and more complex character development. NWN2 and Gothic set out to do different things and while I'd prefer NPCs not to stand around, I can't see that makes it a poorer RPG, especially if it makes up for it in other ways such as character-skill-driven dialogue choices.

Horses for courses but not only was that review poorly written, not only was it contradictory, not only did it hedge it's opinion with a disclaimer at the end, it assumed all roleplaying games should really be Microsoft Fantasy Simulator 2006. A lot of people would like that approach but plenty of people like a different emphasis.

I think this also demonstrates the foolishness of arguing about scoring systems out of context. Does 5/10 mean a perfectly competent but average game to the vast majority of readers? No. It means a piece of crap they would touch with a 50 foot barge pole. It simply doesn't communicate the actual intent.